Hugh Grant Playing Six “Incredibly Evil” Characters in The Wachowski Siblings and Tom Tykwer’s CLOUD ATLAS

Always swinging for the fences, The Wachowski Siblings and Tom Tykwer‘s adaptation of David Mitchell‘s novel Cloud Atlas sounds incredibly ambitious. The cast, which includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Weaving, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Ben Whishaw, and Hugh Grant, has each of the actors playing different characters in different eras. Furthermore, the actors will be undergoing radical transformations for their roles. Whishaw says the actors are swapping genders and races, and now Hugh Grant says he has cameos as six “incredibly evil” characters, which is a radical transformation from his standard “charmingly befuddled” character.

“I have six cameo parts in this strange, ambitious film,” Grant explained. “I do a lot of killing and raping. I wear an awful lot of prosthetic make up, too. You probably won’t know that I am in the film! But it was a laugh. I thought before I read it that I’d turn it down, which I normally do, but I was interested in meeting the Wachowskis because I have always admired them enormously. And they are so charming and fascinating.”

So any details on how the “killing and raping” will go down?

“I slightly called my own bluff. In one of the parts I am a cannibal, about 2000 years in the future, and I thought, ‘I can do that. It’s easy.’ And then I am suddenly standing in a cannibal skirt on a mountaintop in Germany and they are saying, ‘You know, hungry! We must have that flesh-eating, like a leopard who is so hungry…’ and I am thinking, ‘I can’t do that! Just give me a witty line!'”

I agree. There’s no reason that cannibals can’t be witty and foppish. Geez, Wachowskis and Tykwer. Try to have a little imagination.

Here’s the synopsis for David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas:

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation — the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.